Skip to main content

Come In Out Of The Storm, The Weather’s Nice Here: “Hey There Lonely Girl” by Eddie Holman

By Marcello Carlin



The seventies begin with a glance back to 1963, when Ruby and The Romantics made the Top 30 with their song “Hey There Lonely Boy.” Former child star Holman had been recording since 1962, had already amassed several useful records, including Northern Soul favourite “Eddie’s My Name,” and appears to have sung in early manifestations of The Delfonics and The Stylistics, but “Hey There Lonely Girl” was his moment, a fabulous, dreamlike rhapsody of romantic redemption, so flawlessly done that you don’t initially notice his extraordinary falsetto or wonder at all about androgyny. Yet Holman’s falsetto is one of the best there is, technically adept and emotionally satisfying, a clear precursor of Russell Thompkins, Jr., and in this context the song can be interpreted as an invitation to one battle-scarred casualty of a tumultuous decade to seek sanctuary in the (hopefully) better light of a new one.

Date Record Made Number Two: 21 February 1970
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Thank You (Falettin’ Me Be Mice Elf Agin)/Everybody Is a Star” - Sly & The Family Stone
UK Chart Position: 4 (1974 reissue)

Comments

  1. Allen Baekeland31 January 2018 at 20:23

    I remember Tony Blackburn and Emperor Rosko played it so much as an oldie that it had to be reissued.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

By Marcello Carlin
The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...
Post a Comment
Read more

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

By Marcello Carlin
"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...
2 comments
Read more

A Pre-Emptive, Though Hopefully Temporary, Bowing Out: “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” by Elton John

By Marcello Carlin
This isn’t quite the last piece of music I’ll be writing about before taking a long break from writing this blog (and most other things) – there’s one more song tomorrow that I’ve been persuaded to write up before I disappear – but the situation is this; I am imminently due to go into hospital for major surgery to treat a long-standing and hugely-annoying hernia. This should have been sorted out years ago but for reasons too tedious to document it’s only being sorted out now. It is going to be a long, fairly complex and in places possibly pioneering procedure. I am being operated on by world-class surgeons whom I trust implicitly and there has been much liaison between my local hospital (where I’ll be going) and the hospital where I myself work to enable this to happen. However, I have to warn you that the procedure carries a fairly high risk of what medical people call “morbidities,” mainly to do with breathing and cardiac issues, for which I will be closely monitored in I...
4 comments
Read more